12 Days of Christmas Marketing Campaign Ideas

The festive season is the perfect time to branch out with your marketing. It is an unprecedented opportunity to attract new customers and re-engage with previous ones. In this holiday season-themed blog post, we’ll share 12 days of Christmas marketing campaign ideas.

Seasonal Marketing

Seasonal marketing covers so much more than just the holiday season. Summer, easter, back to school, Halloween, and major sporting events should all fall into your seasonal events calendar.

Altering your holiday marketing campaigns to match the seasonal events shows your audience and customers that you’re up-to-date, interested and engaged in the current social space.

12 days of Christmas Marketing Campaign Ideas

The run-up to Christmas may be getting longer, but that doesn’t mean that from November 1st, every single post has to be red and green.

Integrating the Christmas content with your regular schedule keeps things fresh. But let’s look at 12 ways to bring Christmas to your customers this year.

Seasonal Showcase

Everyone loves a seasonal product, from Grinch-themed pyjamas to mince pies and selection boxes. Some things feel different at Christmas; create that feeling for your buyers.

Show social media users your seasonal products and create the warm feeling of Christmas with them.

Exclusive Offers

No family is without their last-minute shopper. There has to be one.

In the last week running up to the big day, you could apply a flash sale on this season’s best sellers, offer free express shipping, or discounted bundles.

User Generated Content

User-generated content can be pre-planned by setting a trend or using a hashtag across a campaign. However, a lot of the time, if you’re creating quality products or offering an incredible service, the content makes itself.

With social media tools like TikTok and Instagram Reels, 79% of people say UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions.

Christmas Past

For longer-running businesses, it’s nice for long-serving customers to remember ads or branches from the past.

We saw a throwback advert recently from McDonald’s called “as featured in”, covering snippets from some key movies and shows McDonalds have featured in over the years. This ad came paired with the “as featured in” meal collection. 

Season of Giving

Everyone loves receiving something for free; I know I do!

I’m not saying give all your stock or services away for free, but a freebie here and there shows your appreciation to customers. Or a gift card for your next purchase from the holiday range.

Gifts increase how customers see you because, like I said, who doesn’t love a freebie? Offering a gift card usually comes with a boost in customer engagement because a gift card is basically free money.

Gift Guides

There are many ways to set up a gift guide for those hard to buy for family members. You can go with a blog, e-commerce subpage, social media carousel, or paid social media posts and create an ultimate gift bundle guide.

Giveaway Campaigns

For small businesses, this may send you into panic mode. However, giveaways can be one of the greatest and even most cost-effective marketing ideas on this list; they also provide an interactive experience where customers feel involved with the business directly.

Giveaways don’t have to be extravagant, and sometimes a tiny loss for significant social uplift, engagement and mentions can see a longer-term benefit to your business.

Small businesses within the same industry often partner together to provide one giveaway bundle to both sets of clients. This results in a more desirable giveaway for the consumers and can all cross-market to two different communities. They also can award customer loyalty and customer engagement. This is through your customers and audience following strict criteria involving sharing and interacting with your giveaway post to enter. A giveaway often provides an incentive for customers to share the brand.

Influencers

It’s no secret that influencer marketing efforts have seen an astronomical increase, and it makes total sense. As the value for influencer marketing reached 16.4 billion USD in 2022, businesses are seeing the value already.

You don’t need a massive influencer budget to pull this off; with the rise of micro-influencers, most have followers of between 10,000 and 100,000. Because of their authenticity, their follower base is loyal, trusting and engaged, making them the perfect people to advocate for your product.

Advent Calendars

One of our favourites on the list of ‘12 days of Christmas Marketing Campaign Ideas’.

Physical, social and email advent calendars can all play an important role in your Christmas marketing strategy.

If you haven’t got a physical calendar planned, designed and in production, it may be too late, but do not worry; there are other solutions!

Social media calendars can be small tokens (jokes, discount codes, gift ideas, Christmas-themed snippets) posted throughout the month. Whether you go 24, 12 or 7 days depends on how much other social content you have going out too.

A previously set up email list will be incredibly beneficial for sharing an email-based advent calendar. Those on your existing email list already hear from you and engage with content, so giving them something extra for Christmas will show your appreciation, and they will feel that.

Traditions

Of course, traditions don’t happen overnight. Technically speaking, it takes three years to consider something a tradition officially, but you have to start somewhere, and the perfect time is now.

One example is the annual Spotify wrapped – highlighting to users their top song, artist and genre from the calendar year. Although this content is regularly shared on personal social media accounts, you can also see a spike in searches on Google for Spotify Wrapped around its annual review.

You can see clear peaks every December for both keywords over the last five years by looking at Google Trends and comparing searches for Spotify and Spotify wrapped.

Trends

The internet is never shy of viral content; between Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, there’s a new hot trend weekly, if not daily.

As Christmas rolls around, it’s easy for brands to hop onto trends to showcase products, seasonal events and how their team celebrates.

From Secret Santa and Christmas Parties to the office elf on the shelf, there is no shortage of Christmas sounds to add to your celebrations.

Christmas Markets

This is one for product-based B2C businesses primarily.

If you’re a smaller business in a local community, a Christmas market is the perfect place to gain new, loyal customers local to you and boost your word-of-mouth sales opportunities.

Get stuck into meeting people and engaging with your community because people appreciate and value it.

If you’re still looking for inspiration, check out our top 5 unique seasonal marketing campaigns to see how you can stand out this festive season.

Key Takeaways

• Everyone takes Christmas to the next level
• Who doesn’t love a freebie?
• There are plenty of opportunities for small businesses to get themselves out there.
• Follow the socials and see what everyone else is doing.

There you have it: 12 days of Christmas Marketing Campaign Ideas. If you’re ready to take your search marketing to the next level in the new year, speak to the ROAR team and see how we can help you.